Stephan Erasmus

Listings(s)

'Hinterland'

The idea of the hinterland directly revolves around what could be described as a geographical area which has been forgotten or left alone for whatever reason the people of a country might have. The focus of this exhibition will take  a more symbolic/metaphoric approach to the understanding of Hinterland as a premise for this exhibition. 

The idea that the ‘Hinterland’ can lie ‘beyond what is visible’ opens up the possibilities for the exploration of this word. This idea and understanding of Hinterland carries the same usage of the word in late colonial Britain where hinterland was used to express the breadth and depth of ‘other matters’. But with regards to the practice of the artists participating in this exhibition the focus for the exploration can be narrowed down to memory. The metaphorical usage of Hinterland in relation to memory, indicates an exploration of the hinterland of memory, whether personal memory or the collective memory of a people. There is a strong possibility that the artists participating will undertake their own exploration from the personal point of view, where the almost forgotten and less vested memories will become the landscape being traversed and exposed.

15 March 2014 - 05 April 2014

'Reconstruct'

tr.v. re·con·struct·ed, re·con·struct·ing, re·con·structs 

1. To construct again; rebuild. 

2. To assemble or build again mentally; re-create: reconstructed the sequence of events from the evidence. 

3. To cause to adopt a new attitude or outlook: a diehard traditionalist who could not be reconstructed. 

In Stephan Erasmus’s work structure plays an important role with particular focus on the encryption process. In preceding exhibitions he has used encryption systems as structures to turn the selected text into visual love letters addressed to an ever changing muse. In these exhibitions the focus was placed on the final structure as it relates to the muse this can clearly be seen in works from ‘Hartland’ where the final image in some way referenced the manifestation of the muse: the landscape, creating a direct link between the muse as Gaia. In ‘Hartland’ Gaia manifests as South Africa and the exhibition explores the artists relationship with the country as muse, sometimes as a lover and at other times as a rejected and ridiculed lover.

‘Reconstruct’ departs from the muse as the main character as seen in the previous exhibitions. In this exhibition Erasmus continues exploring the act of writing love letters through the sampling of existing text and transforming the text into two dimensional and three dimensional objects. The act of writing love letters into artworks remains a central point around which Erasmus constructs his work.  However, the focus moves away from the muse as the intended reader of the love letters, in a form that resembles the muse, and focus of his production is shifting to the act of writing and the encryption of the love letters, where the letter becomes a pattern, an object that entraps the reader/muse.

It has been suggested by Nick Cave at a series of lectures that the act of writing love letters can be equated to the binding of the recipient to the writer. Cave speaks of the act of writing as a ‘magical act’ of weaving a web and trapping the beloved in the web, binding the recipient to the writer. 

In ‘Reconstruct’ Erasmus continues to encrypt selected sections of existing text taken from love songs and poetry. In this body of work the text becomes an incantation to bind the muse to the words. For Erasmus the act of writing/weaving/reconstruction of the text becomes the focus. The process of encryption becomes in a very physical sense the weaving or the building of a web that would entangle the reader.

20 October 2013 - 06 November 2013